How Clash of Clans Is Taking Bullying to the Virtual Playground

I visited my 10-year-old nephew, Luca, earlier this month, and he spent the entire weekend checking his mother’s iPhone. But, sadly, he wasn’t having fun.

Like millions of other boys, he is obsessed with Clash of Clans, a super popular game played on smartphones. For those of you (like me) who have never played Clash of Clans, it is an online multiplayer game made by Supercell, a company in Helsinki, Finland.

Players band together to create a community, or clan, and then attack others to earn gold and elixirs. It has all the juicy stuff you’d imagine would pique the interest of 10-year-olds, including goblins, destruction and in-game chat.

But what makes the game irresistible for some is its cliquish and exclusionary nature. The game creates a kind of social hierarchy, with different tiers for troops, kings, queens and other characters. Clan leaders are also given the power to exclude users, or to promote or demote other members within the clan.

It’s this feature that quickly spiraled into a digital “Lord of the Flies” for my nephew and his friends, and made him feel so sad earlier this month.

My sister, Leanne Citrone, knew that Luca had been playing this game on her iPhone, but beyond that, didn’t think much of it.

Then a few weeks ago, at a school-related function, a father who had been exploring the game on his own son’s account approached my sister and politely warned her that something was not right in the online world.

“You should maybe talk to Luca about Clash of Clans,” the father said to my sister. “He has been demoting other friends.”

After some investigating, my sister found out that Luca was a clan leader and that he had demoted a classmate from a clan that a few students belonged to. She had a long talk with Luca, demanding that he reinstate the boy’s power in the clan. He did so, but that wasn’t the end of it.

Luca’s classmates created a new clan, and the members refused to let him join. Luca asked repeatedly to be allowed in to play, but was ignored. So he spent that entire weekend obsessively checking his mother’s phone, each time discovering he was still excluded.

On Monday morning, word of the online revolt had become such a heated topic at school that teachers had to address the entire class and explain why it was wrong to exclude others from their clans.

If this all sounds terribly childish, let’s not forget we are talking about 10-year-old boys here. But that also illustrates why this is so important.

“Social patterns in the real world are replicated in the online world,” said Caroline Knorr, parenting editor of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that focuses on children and technology. “It’s not as easy as just saying, ‘Well, find another game or go on a different server.’ Social circles coalesce around certain popular games. Kids even act them out on the playground. So, not being a part of the group takes a toll.”

Because of this, Ms. Knorr said, it’s imperative that parents talk to their children about their online worlds, and to understand that excluding classmates can be a form of bullying.

The father who had approached my sister, Jeremy Rosenthal, told me in a phone interview that he had spent considerable time watching the way the children interacted in the game and that the clan’s controversy reminded him of the famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971.

In that study, a group of students was randomly assigned the roles of guard or prisoner in a mock prison, set up in a Stanford University basement. The guards were quick to exert authoritarian control over prisoners, and subject them to physical and extreme psychological torture. The guards became so sadistic that the experiment was stopped early.

“The thing I’ve found with Clash of Clans is that because of the hierarchical structure, you have another possibility of excluding, or of creating, a great bond with friends,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “The positive is that you can learn about technology in a relatively safe manner as you can only chat with people in your clan, and it teaches building and strategy. The bad side is that it can allow kids to overtly enforce, and create, very hierarchical bullying.”

Brian Crecente, news editor for the popular gaming website Polygon, said he went through a similar situation with his 14-year-old son, and has learned that in the same way parents watch what children do in the playground, they should monitor these online playgrounds.

“You have to remind your children that just because you’re on a computer, the rules haven’t changed,” Mr. Crecente said. When things get too stressful in the video game world, he said, he tells his son to invite friends over to play together in person.

My sister tried this, too. After the controversy over Clash of Clans faded at my nephew’s school, he and his friends turned off their video games and went camping over the Memorial Day weekend. As the parents sat around discussing the chaos of the last month, new trouble had set in.

The boys were playing with water guns, and someone had the bright idea to fill them with urine instead of water. Which, my sister said, reminded everyone that mayhem comes naturally to 10-year-old boys, whether online or in the real world.